The biggest hurdles lie ahead, however. The House version of the bill goes further than the Senate in addressing the technology sector's talent woes in some respects, but makes things much worse in others. Negotiations will no doubt be difficult as groups on the right and the left bicker over closing the borders and high-skilled immigration.

AsImmigration Voice founder Aman Kaporexplained in an e-mail, the Senate version of the bill has many of the provisions that his group has been lobbying for"such as the elimination of per-country limits and expansion in the numbers of green cards. The House bill also eliminates per-country limits but doesn't go very far in increasing the number of green cards. He estimates that the House bill will provide 350,000 fewer green cards for skilled workers annually than what the Senate approved.

This is a serious problem.

In 2007, my research teams at Duke, Harvard and New York University estimated that there were more than one million skilled workers and their families in the U.S. who were waiting for green cards. We learned that these workers were getting frustrated and returning home. This backlog has likely increased since then. It is the primary cause of the continuing reversebrain drain I and others have been tracking.

The only solution to slow this tide is to increase the number of green cards.

An immigration bill making it's way through the House, which is of course subject to change,goes further than the Senate in providing something that technology executives have been asking for: an increase in the number of H-1B visas to 195,000 versus110,000in the Senate bill. This is good, but increasing the number of workers on temporary visas without proportionately increasing the numbers of green cards will only worsen the brain drain. Immigration Voice's Kapor says that by some estimates, over a 20-year period, the House bill will add 14 million skilled immigrants on temporary work visas, while there will only be 3.3 million green cards issued to these workers over the same period. If that's indeed the case, it will spell disaster for the tech industry.

Additionally, one of Silicon Valley's most critical needs is for a Startup Visa. The Senate version provides this, but it is highly restrictive. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) attempted topass legislationthat improved this bill, but was unsuccessful. My hope is that the House incorporates key parts of his recommendations, including the tightened-up language that requires jobs created by immigrant entrepreneurs be held by Americans, and the requirement for reduced paperwork and lowered barriers between family members and the ability to invest in their startup company. We need to make it as easy as we can for innovators to come to the U.S. to start their companies here.

As I have explained, a Startup Visa is immigrationreform's free lunch. Kauffman Foundationestimatedthat within ten years this could lead to the creation of between 500,000 and 1.6 million jobs"a potential boost to the economy of between $70 billion and $224 billion a year. By some estimates, this translates into a rise in GDP of between 0.5 and 1.6 percent.

No doubt, we will see ugly battles being fought in the halls of Congress over immigration reform in the coming months. Let's hope that Congress defies the odds and approves a bill that gives the economy the boost it needs.

About Author

Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University; Fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and distinguished visiting scholar, Halle Institute of Global Learning, Emory University. He is author of ”The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent”–which was named by The Economist as a Book of the Year of 2012.

Wadhwa oversees the academic programs at Singularity University, which educates a select group of leaders about the exponentially growing technologies that are soon going to change our world. These advances—in fields such as robotics, A.I., computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—are making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve the grand challenges in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security.

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